As a recruitment or HR manager, you are always looking for ways to help make the hiring process simple, reliable, fast and cost-effective, highlights Julian Panter.
But if you have to wait until, let’s say, the 15th of every month for your monthly report to get visibility of spending levels or distribution of workers, is that really the most effective way to manage and make those all-important decisions that can impact the bottom line?
Surely there must be a better way.
Visibility of expenditure
In the fast-moving world of recruitment, things change and evolve day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year. But there is one thing that remains constant: employers want and need visibility over their spend.
That means having full transparency from their managed service provider (MSP) to be able to see the full picture, and it is where management information systems come in – to enhance the performance of the recruitment process and deliver efficiency to an organisation in a well-defined and manageable manner.
But management information is not what it used to be. The difference now is that clients do not want this information tomorrow, or next week, or next month – they want it now. And in the current economic climate, they should expect nothing less than this level of service from their partners.
New challenges for recruiters
Each year brings a new challenge for recruiters and HR managers. Just look at what has happened over the past few years. During the pandemic, clients were asking more of their MSPs, relying on them to provide budget and cost information to help them make tough decisions as they reacted to the external pressures. The narrative moved on to how Brexit was going to influence the workforce. And now this year, it is all about cuts and spending.
Employers want to know: is spend going down or up? Who is hiring? Why are they hiring? Who has approved it? These are all questions that employers need answers to. But they need more than bog standard reporting. They need a high level overview that can answer their own questions for them. In this day and age, where technology allows us to do more, that means having access to tools that allow them to drill down into the data that matters.
Whether it is breakdown of spend, placements, rate information, location, diversity and equality across your workforce, oversight of who manages what, where and why I am spending, a tool that offers real-time data updates can show you all of this, at a glance – with the ability to click, right click and filter information within a matter of minutes.
What are the benefits of an auditable system?
What is more, a system that is auditable means that you can always see what changes have been made and why, giving another layer of transparency by capturing justifications so you can always see what happened and why certain decisions have been made. By having all that information right there, in real-time, the role of the recruitment/HR manager becomes all the more simple, efficient and effective – all at the click of a button.
Gone are the days of calling up your account manager to access certain information – and potentially wait hours or days for a response. In the past, it could take hours to manually pull together this kind of report but if you look at some of the smartest management information technology on the market today, you can remove all of this friction. You just have to login and get everything you need, whenever and wherever you need it.
Regardless of which sector you work in, there’s a minefield of data just waiting to be unlocked. Don’t just settle for the status quo, now is the time to take a deeper dive into your data – and find a solution that can allow you to improve your entire recruitment process in the most timely and efficient manner that technology today allows for.
